James Whittaker is a technology executive focused on making the web a better place for users and developers. He is a former Googler, former professor and former startup founder. Follow him on Twitter @docjamesw.

Why I hate search

The word 'search' is a negative word. It fairly reeks of loss and effort. You lose your car keys and you search for them. Your pet runs away and you search for her. Having to search implies loss. It implies effort. Search is a means to an end. You search to rescue; you seek to find. There is little that is pleasant about the process itself. The only time to feel good about a search is when it ends, successfully.

Now, let's consider those car keys for a moment. You lose them once and you search for them. Lose them again and you repeat the search. Lose them enough times and you'll get better at finding them because you'll know where you tend to leave them. That's the thing about search, you can redo it from scratch or you can pay attention and not have to search so much. And your lost pet? Lose a beloved pet once and you are unlikely to lose her again. Not because you've gotten better at search, but because you now take pains not to lose her a second time. You can be stupid about search if you like, or you can be thoughtful and more organized so you decrease your reliance on it. You don't have to search for things that are not lost.

We could do the same thing online, be thoughtful and organized, but we don't. We start from scratch each time. We search for things we've already found.

The problem with Internet search is that being stupid about it is profitable. The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well? It's 2012 and we are still typing search queries into a text box. Now you know why, a 'find engine' swims in the shallow end of the profit pool. Is it any surprise that technology such as Siri came from a company that doesn't specialize in search? (Where do you place an ad in a Siri use case?)

There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.

We can do better. We've been searching for over a decade. We know every place possible where the online equivalent of car keys are found. We know where our online pet is, always. We know so many things about the world that no longer need to be served up as search "results." (Results indeed! If users ever wake up and divorce their search engine, the "results" page is likely to be exhibit A in the separation hearing.)

Search, my friends, is broken. Finding things has become secondary to monetizing the search process. Fixing this situation is not in the best interest of the incumbents. Which, actually, is all well and good because the fix will need a more web-wide effort anyway. The companies that own the data sources, the companies that ingest, store and conflate that data, the myriad small development shops that do interesting things with the data, the cleverness of the people who curate the data and the power of crowdsourced know-how need to come together and make search ... better? No, not better, irrelevant.

For Siri, what if you can add a sponsored message like: Closest Chinese restaurant is 2 blocks away, "however I recommend you try a Thai place which's 1 block away" or general sponsored message like "I think Coca-Cola tastes great with Chinese food"

"Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for."

One word: competition.

Google knows that, for its users, Bing or Yahoo is only a click away. They also know that their customer's loyalty is only as strong as their last search and, once a user switches default search engine, it is *very* difficult to get them back.

Not sure I understand. What's "Search 2.0"? Doing a 's/search/something-else/g' is just marketing, and including semi-relevant links (e.g. search for "hotels in palo alto", get a hotel widget) is just a point-release upgrade over standard search. Returning more relevant links and countering SEO techniques allows users to find what they are looking for, but again, that's just a minor upgrade.

What's the revolution? We got from Gopher to Web Search as the amount of data got too big. Now the amount of data is (too big)^2.

Perhaps instead of returning links to pages that might have relevant content, return the actual data from various pages, synchronized together. Basically, a "Siri" that you can ask things like, "What does SQL Server Error 2012 mean?".

For me Google is often more about 'discover' new source than 'find' something what I've lost. And I feel comfortable with their business model. I wouldn't pay for a premium search even if it was more accurate. Why? Because I like to make choices by myself and quite often this lower accuracy leads to nice discoveries.

GOOGLE search is dead. I have switched to DuckDuckGo. And we DO need search because it's just impossible to Bookmark everything (have you seen the state of bookmarking? it's worse than search!) and some of us wipe our History when we shut the browser.

I once told some search executives that Google and Bing TOGETHER have less than 6% of what people want to FIND – things to buy. They have become stepping stones to Find Engines: The top 3 advertising verticals, neither Google nor Bing are players: Automotive (you use autoTrader.com), Real Estate (Realtor.com or other), Retail (you use the stores site 'cos you need to filter search).

What a whole bunch of nonsense. I've worked at Google and they take search quality very seriously. In fact, the search quality guys are not allowed to talk to the ads guys to avoid exactly this type of influence.

Sure money matters, and there is an "apparent" conflict. But in reality, the better the search results are, the more likely that users will use the search engine, which leads to more $$$. There is plenty of literature that demonstrates how serving poor search results will actually result in less ad revenue.

So James, being a former Googler, you should know this very well. Why did you decide to misrepresent the facts?

I think we will always have some sort of search. How do we discover things we never had in the first place? I had to 'search' to find my house and 'search' to find my car before I bought them. This applies to information as well. Unfortunately, we aren't born knowing everything. Do you mean we need to re-think and/or redefine search?

oddly enough, having used bing on windows phone since january 2011 and on the desktop since last summer, i can no longer stand it because google almost always returns better search results (i.e. what i was expecting to find).

then again, i may be using search in the wrong way, because, to be honest, it's still essential to me and the people around me.

My significant other purchased a new iPhone. With it came Siri, a fresh new toy. Push the button and ask Siri the meaning of live. Ooooh ahhh, answers a bit better than Eliza emerge. It was a novelty that lasted about 2 weeks and is now almost forgotten.

She started using Internet search engines years ago to find web sites and she still does today. If search is dead, then it must be the walking dead as it continues shambling forward into the future alongside the masses that utilize it daily.